Will Parrish: Coastal Trail Or Trail Of Tears?

The physical geography that First Nations people have historically inhabited conveniently remains a mystery to most people in the dominant society. Seemingly, those willfully ignorant of such knowledge would include everyone in decision-making positions at the City of Fort Bragg and the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) who, for the better part of a decade, have been devising an infrastructure project along 4.5 miles of coastline outside of the city without bothering to consult the people who have inhabited the land since time immemorial.

Those people, the Northern Pomo, lived along the coastal bluffs and contiguous redwood forests in and around what is now called “Fort Bragg” for at least 10,000 years prior to the arrival of Gold Rush-era California intruders. Many Northern Pomo people are currently part of the Sherwood Valley Rancheria in Willits, which is comprised of various coastal Pomo people. But some still live right in the vicinity of the historical Pomo village of Kaidu, near the mouth of the Noyo River.

The infrastructure project, known as the Fort Bragg Coastal Trail and Restoration Project, encompasses virtually all of the beachfront land west of the city, north of the Noyo River, and south of the Georgia Pacific Mill site.

On the surface, most people would view the project as entirely benign. It dovetails nicely with the cultural sensibilities and economic interests of most people in the area, outdoors enthusiasts and those linked to the coast’s tourist economy being chief among them. The project would develop a network of trails and walking paths, stretching north from Pudding Creek Trestle Bridge south to Soldier Bay. It would also include habitat restoration on 45 acres of land currently covered in asphalt, allowing vegetation and trees to return to those places, once again making it habitable for wildlife.

Of historical significance, this new park would mark the first time in more than 100 years that the coast outside of Fort Bragg would be publicly accessible. The city obtained funding for the project from a wide variety of sources, including the California Coastal Conservancy, a federal appropriation, Prop 84 funds through State Parks, the Fort Bragg’s General Fund, and a Bicycle Transportation Account Grant.

There’s only one problem with these seemingly groovy plans to open up a new area where hundreds of thousands of tourists will experience the grandeur of the oceanfront strolling, presumably before retiring into town to enrich the fortunes of the town’s boutique tourist economy. It so happens many of the Northern Pomo’s most sacred sites, including burial sites, would be desecrated by the trail development.

As Talisha Melluish, director of Sherwood Valley Rancheria’s Historic Preservation Office, puts it, “the tribe is just disappointed that a city that wants to build a trail on this area wouldn’t know the history of the area much better.”

As currently envisioned, a significant amount of construction resulting in considerable disturbance to the ground and that which lies beneath it, would go into creating the trails. The primary trail on the North Parkland would be eight feet wide and made of asphalt, as would the primary trail in the South Parkland. They would also include a four foot wide gravel shoulder on their western edge. The secondary trails would be five foot wide asphalt. All of this would be taking place in ancient burial sites.

An archeological survey by CalTrans found 22 archeological sites with Northern Pomo’s human and cultural remains that are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, the United States federal government’s official list of sites, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation purely by virtue of their historical significance.

“Faunal remains are present at many of the sites in the District and studies of those materials can inform research into changing subsistence orientations, the effects of intensified exploitation on the local ecosystem, and other related topics. Plant remains, while not yet studied at the sites in the District, are implied by the presence of milling implements a several of the sites. The presence of a rare Franciscan chert outcrop, combined with the ready availability of wave-worn graywacke cobbles that could be adapted for grinding and pecking tools, together imply the potential for technological studies of toolmaking. Abundant obsidian is likely to yield insights into trade patterns through that also have important implications for the hypothesized prehistoric cultural displacement already mentioned. Lastly, this District provides an exceptional opportunity to investigate historic period cultural adjustments due to the continuity of Native American occupation during the operation of the Mendocino Reservation and subsequent years when the ethnographic village of Kadiu was occupied. Biological data from Native Americans in the Noyo Point Cemetery may also yield important data on health status, nutrition, and related topics.”

To add to the historical significance of the site, particularly for native people, the land was also part of the Mendocino Indian Reservation, which operated from 1853 to 1860 and acted as the first Indian reservation on the North Coast. The reservation spanned in size from the South Bank of the Noyo River to around Westport.

Ironically, Fort Bragg officials did undertake a fairly extensive “community decision-making process” about the trail project beginning in 2002, including several meetings soliciting public input and site walks that involved “various stakeholders,” as the city’s literature on the project put it They failed, however, to contact any Northern Pomo people about these meetings.

Representatives of the city counter the criticism that they have failed to consult with the aboriginal people of the land by claiming that Pomo people could have attended the community involvement meetings as easily as any of the other “stakeholders.” Indigenous people, however, are not part of a communal melting pot blended together with white society and other ethnic groups. Rather, they are sovereign groups and require that negotiations take place on terms that work for them, not just those that work for the dominant society.

The Sherwood Valley Rancheria has strong grounds for a lawsuit based on the lack of consultation. Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) requires that agencies that receive federal funding to develop infrastructure follow a set process for consulting with Native people. In this case, the City of Fort Bragg received federal grant funding by way of CalTrans, CalTrans is required to oversee the “Tribal Consultation Process,” and the City of Fort Bragg is also required to partake in that process.

While the City did send out a letter to a large number of federally recognized Northern California tribes in 2009 probing for their input on a vaguely described restoration project on the coast, the Supreme Court ruled in Pueblo of Sandia v US that a letter does not constitute a good faith effort in seeking tribal consultation.

The significance of the project extends well beyond the trail itself. The Fort Bragg trail project is intended to jump-start the effort to rezone the largest industrial installation, the former Georgia-Pacific lumber mill site, to residential, commercial and industrial use. The City’s Master Plan states that “large portions” of the Mill Site “have not been surveyed,” and “there is a high potential for the further discovery of cultural resources.” Notably, the GP Mill site is owned by the far right-wing oil and paper product magnates, the Koch Brothers, whose combined wealth exceeds $40 billion.

Representatives of Sherwood Valley Rancheria, including Talisha Melluish, have only in the last few months been able to enter into consultations with Fort Bragg and CalTrans officials about the project. Those agencies have developed a few options that would somewhat reduce the amount of disruption to the Pomo cultural sites. Melluish states that while she will continue to negotiate in an effort to minimize the disruption of her people’s sacred sites, she would strongly prefer that the city abandon the project altogether.

“At a meeting earlier this year, one of our tribal members made a great point,” Talisha Melluish says. “He said that, essentially, they’re bringing this trail into our backyard. And does anybody want the city they live in to bring a trail into their backyard?”

The AVA will feature a more detailed story on the Northern Pomo’s cultural history in the GP Mill area and the Fort Bragg Trail Project in coming weeks.
~~

2 Comments

Thanks for doing this. The urge is to just turn away from the deluge of ugly corruption. Of course ignoring something is enabling it. Fort Bragg is the plaything of the Koch brothers and their criminal associates. Changing that means confronting the reality.

Really important work you are doing. Well written. This is precisely why I hope I can connect tribal elders to the trail project in the works to build bike trails from Cloverdale all the way to the coast, and from Boonville to Ukiah.

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Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. ~Robert Ingersoll

All religion is a foolish answer to a foolish question. ~Thomas Shelby

The strongly religious fear our capacity for moral reasoning that does not require a magical, invisible deity. They fear our ability to be ethical without the threat of hell or the reward of heaven. They fear that our allegiance is not to this or that country, or this or that prophet, or this or that guru, but to humanity as a whole. ~Phil Zuckerman

The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat is surely, from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn’t he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured? ~Richard Dawkins

Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon

All religions are lies and scams, and all believers are victims. ~David Silverman

We [atheists] have no martyrs, we have no saints. ~Christopher Hitchens

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. ~H L Mencken

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Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion. ~Jon Stewart

My 12th year was my most Christian and most boring year in my life. ~Chuck Berry

Come on. You just can’t come up with anything more ridiculous than someone who honestly thinks that all human woes stem from an incident in which a talking snake accosted a naked woman in a primeval garden and talked her into eating a piece of fruit. ~Keith Parsons

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

Christians don’t need to be born again, they need to grow up. ~John Shelby Spong

Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced. ~Alan Watts

Society is like a stew: If you don't stir it up every now and then, the scum rises to the top.~Edward Abbey

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~Buckminster Fuller

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one. ~ Richard Dawkins

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while praying for a fish. ~ Anon

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The only true definition of an atheist: a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in God or gods. ~Oxford English Dictionary

You have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Faith is just another word for gullibility.

I sang as one / Who on a tilting deck sings / To keep men's courage up, though the wave hangs / That shall cut off their sun. ~C. Day Lewis

Resilience Tools (Basic)

Freethought/Stoics

Religion Divides

The Wikipedia of Christian Terrorism (Link)

Books of the Freethinkers Bible

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this because some genes are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria. And, above all, the genetic code itself — the dictionary by which all genes are translated — is the same across all living creatures that have ever been looked at. We are all cousins. Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth? And the most wonderful thing of all is that we know for certain it is literally true...

The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye — and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all! In fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. They don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or anesthetics. In fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them! If these 'holy books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all-knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things? -Richard Dawkins

Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws… It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such.

I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? -Zora Neale Hurston

Democratic Socialism

Socialist Alternative is the organization that spearheaded the campaign to elect Kshama Sawant to Seattle City Council, the first independent socialist elected in a major U.S. city in decades. We are a national organization fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We are community activists fighting against budget cuts in public services; we are activists campaigning for a $15/hour minimum wage and fighting, democratic unions; we are people of all colors speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia.

We believe the Republicans and Democrats are both parties of big business, and we are campaigning to build an independent, alternative party of workers and young people to fight for the interests of the millions, not the millionaires.

We see the global capitalist system as the root cause of the economic crisis, poverty, discrimination, war, and environmental destruction. As capitalism moves deeper into crisis, a new generation of workers and youth must join together to take the top 500 corporations into public ownership under democratic control to end the ruling elites’ global competition for profits and power.

We believe the dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were perversions of what socialism is really about.

We are for democratic socialism where ordinary people will have control over our daily lives.

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In the history of the world, the number of times a supernatural anything has been proven true is zero. Every god, ghost, spirit, devil, possession, and miracle ever claimed true is a lie. No exceptions. The number of times an atheistic (godless) argument has been proven wrong by a theistic argument is zero... In contrast, every time a theist-versus-atheist argument has been settled, an atheistic argument has won. This does not mean science is antireligion; it just means (or rather, strongly implies) religion is wrong... I challenge anyone to find any scientifically valid testable proof of anything supernatural, ever. If you can prove it, even once, I'll quit my job. I'm not nervous, as it has never been done in history, because it's ALL a lie. ~David Silverman, President

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman